Operational and pragmatic though it is, the concept of literature seems, more often than not, to escape definition. The canonical concept and idea of literature have been taken ―for granted‖ over from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: a concept based essentially on the autonomy and on the ―self-centredness‖ of arts. A supreme ruler in the province of culture well into the twentieth century, literature has, alas, been ruthlessly overthrown by unscrupulous rivals such as the new media (cinema and television, in particular), as well as other forms of writing (journalism and non-fiction, for instance).
This is precisely how the imperious need arose to rethink the concept of literature, either by becoming aware of the situation itself, or by looking in premodern epochs for models, particularly in the Middle Ages, when literature was neither conceptualized nor ruling supreme, much rather in fierce competition with the prevailingly oral elaborate use of the word. It is only by looking back ―without anger‖ that we can ferret out intriguing similarities between the past and the present. And taking the reasoning a step further, it is only by raising comparative awareness that literature can regain strength and meaning, and even if it is no longer expected to rule supreme, we would be well advised, to my mind, to view the new media as firmly grounded in it.
To conclude, we must give credit where it is due and admit that, even if the avant-garde writings of the twentieth century have greatly contributed to our growing cognition and consciousness, the new media has emerged in the past
decades as a force to be reckoned with in a world where borders are being constantly blurred.

With the economic development of Romania by the end of the 19th century, new economic realities emerged that called for an appropriate terminological representation, which fact resulted in borrowing from Italian, the language of a country where the banking system was well-developed, and hence an ideal source thereof. Our presentation will include an analysis of the financial, economic and banking terminology adopted by the Romanian language, of the process of adapting these Italian terms to the peculiarities of
the borrowing language, and a statistics of borrowings based on the most representative Romanian lexicographical works.

This contribution analyzes Aristotle‘s influence on the modern understanding of theater (based on the concept of the drama script) as a restriction and reduction of the potentiality of theater. Therefore, it presents a comparative analysis of the objectives of the antique theatrical practices around the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. (before Aristotle) and Schlingensief‘s ―Action 18,
Kill Politic‖ (2002). It provides also a transcultural examination that helps explain the meaning of the postdramatic transgression of taboos, its productive
aesthetics of risk, and its social and political potentiality. Thus, the performance ―Action 18, Kill Politic‖ is analyzed as a process-oriented and
experiencebased aesthetic of risk as well as a ‗social drama‘ in everyday life.

In 1947, after the conclusion of the Resistance movement, the Italian writer Luigi Meneghello emigrated to England. At first, the English environment proved to be harsh, as he would admit years later in his autobiographical work, Il dispatrio (1993). It was a journey of initiation and break-up at the same time. Focusing on Il dispatrio, this essay aims to analyse the geographies of boundary, paying a particular attention on how the social and linguistic differences between Italy and England are filtered and expressed through a peculiar syntax of the space. All this leads to the possibility of reading Meneghello‘s work as a crossing narration, by which writing attempts at mapping the movement of the protagonist from the margin to the centre.

his article utilizes the special issue theme to discuss old
disciplinary boundaries in the study of rhetoric that has limited American and Eurasian academic connections, and to begin the process of creating new global collaborative territories. Current boundaries have produced several intellectual and scholarly gaps, including differences in institutional hierarchies, and economic challenges that are threatening higher education from a variety of standpoints. In addition, eclectic theoretical foundations, conceptual differences with the words communication and communications and differing institutional nomenclatures for American communication departments provide additional impediments. This article subsequently suggests five avenues for erecting global disciplinary bridges for new collaborative territories, including increased awareness of scholarly histories, international scholars, the perceptions of the relationships between rhetoric, argumentation, and persuasion, and scholarly organizations as well as taking advantage of synchronous and asynchronous technologies that can foster mutual global scholarly awareness and participation.

The present article argues that the examination of the significance of Gothic motifs in Caryl Phillips‘s The Lost Child (2015) reveals the author‘s approach to unresolved individual and collective traumas that haunt his protagonists, but also his texts. The intricate interaction between the circular structure of the novel and the theme of historical and generational cyclicity requires a special attention to the journey trope and its spatial markers. The title of this essay is borrowed from Chapter III of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights (1847), The Lost Child’s canonical intertext, in which Catherine‘s ghost appears at the window and begs Lockwood to let her in. Drawing on some concepts developed by Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1993), the essay explores the meaning and function of spectrality and how it relates to circularity and to Phillips‘s commitment to justice, which goes beyond remembering the ―lost children‖ of the past, to actually let them in the present.